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"This is True Love," says Pete, "you think this happens every day?"
Patrick blinks at him and shrugs a little. "Well. Yeah."
Only, that's not actually where the story starts. It could start with the year Pete was born, or the year Patrick was, or the day Patrick met Joe in Borders, or the day Pete heard Patrick sing, but it doesn't start there either, this time.
It starts in Canada.
They're in Toronto, finished the first show and waiting a day before the second, and Pete says, "Come with me."
Like: hurry up please, it's time.
Pete's rented this really normal-looking Toyota, an old station wagon that must be from rent-a-wreck or something, or else he borrowed it from somebody on the crew. It reminds Patrick of cars guys he knew drove when he was in high school, cars they inherited from their moms and didn't put any work into except maybe new stereo speakers, old red paint job and phenomenal barkers. This car's speakers are crap, and all it has is a radio, one with *dials* that Patrick twists until he finds college radio and listens to it with the windows down, driving out into suburbia that looks the same in Toronto as it does in Chicago, really.
Just miles of ranch-style three-bedroom bungalows and school yards and small strip malls with grocery stores in them and the odd Blockbuster or Mac's, which seems to be the Canadian version of 7-11, and then Pete pulls into the parking lot of this really ordinary-looking brick church. It's just part of the who neighborhood look -- mid-60s architecture and really determined normalcy. But it's a nice night: stars and a few crickets and the odd, daylight-impaired bird.
Patrick gets out of the car and leans on it. Looks at the sky. When he looks down, Pete's kneeling at his feet.
He says, "Marry me."
"Yeah, you're funny."
"This is True Love," says Pete, "you think this happens every day?"
Patrick blinks at him and shrugs a little. "Well. Yeah."
Which really obviously pisses Pete off, but he just snorts and keeps looking up at Patrick. And after a second Patrick realizes Pete's got a ring. It's really nice. It hasn't got stones set in it or anything; it's clearly a ring for a guy. But it's also obviously an engagement ring. And it's sized for Patrick.
Pete says, again. "Marry me. Please. If you hate it, you can get it annulled and be all Britney Spears, or you can go back to Chicago and ignore it. Just. Marry me. Please."
Patrick stares at him.
And Pete actually looks a bit appalled. "You. You think this is *ordinary*? It's True Love! This shit isn't *commonplace*."
Patrick says, "I love Joe and Andy. That's true and it's love. Why doesn't that count?"
Pete's looking a bit upset. "Because it...well, okay, it does. But it doesn't!"
Patrick says, "And you know, it used to be true that the world was flat."
"Oh my god, it never was."
And Patrick says, "No, no, but people thought it was and it *was*. For them. So true love can be true and then you learn better -- you see better or you get up high enough or you do math, whatever -- and something else becomes true, but it was true for a while. Love can be like that."
"Yeah, but you're assuming that "true" and "love" stuck together are the same as True Love," Pete says.
And Patrick says, "I can't believe you're arguing semantics in front of a church in the middle of Canada!"
Pete's starting to get mad, but he's still down on his knees, and it's starting to feel a bit sleazy, but he's holding the ring out, and he says, "True love. Seriously."
Patrick snorts. He says, in his Comic Book Guy voice, "Worst. Proposal. Ever." And he reaches out to smack Pete upside the head. But Pete catches Patrick's hand and puts the ring on him.
Which is actually a pretty clever maneuver. And Patrick's staring at him. But he can feel the ring on his hand, and it's kind of warm. From Pete's hands, really, but it feels ... sharp. And bright, like it's alive.
Just for a second, he thinks maybe this is a good idea.
Which, when you're dealing with Pete, is all it takes. Pete's dragging him by the hand up the little walk and into the church with is very normally church-y, with low-pile carpet in the foyer and a guest book and a lady minister wearing jeans under her surplice, and she looks a bit crooked, and says, "You guys realize this is for real, right?"
Pete says, "Yeah." And Patrick's sort of "... yeah." He thinks she can hear the ellipse.
And she looks at them, and then she says, "Yeah. That's usually how it is."
And she tells him -- because she's really just telling Patrick, it's obvious Pete already knows -- most of the weddings she does are straight ones that're planned for about a year and cost a fortune, but she gets these nights where two kids'll come up from the States, no friends or family or anything, and they look all shocked, but it doesn't mean they don't mean it. She has a lesbian couple in her congregation who're on more or less perpetual call to be witnesses.
They're #3 on her speed dial.
And they show up, like, twenty minutes later, both thirty-something and wearing clean shirts and men's blazers and it looks like maybe they had fun spiking each other's hair. They both have hickeys showing above their blazer collars.
The minister's been talking to them the whole time, low and soothing like she really knows how panicked Patrick is. Whereas Pete's kind of weirdly radiant, like he can't stop grinning, and he has a death grip on Patrick's hand.
And just before they walk *up the aisle*, no joke, Pete lifts up Patrick's hand, with their fingers laced, and kisses the back of it, and Patrick melts.
And while he's still goo, Pete pulls a tiny velvet bag out of his other pocket, with two rings in it. Patrick says, "but I've already got a ring" and Pete says, "Yeah, an *engagement* ring."
These aren't. These are white gold, really plain, like you could wear them forever, and they have their initials engraved on the inside.
And it happens just like that. With both of them in their jeans and t-shirts and hoodies and rings, and two lesbians they've never met before witnessing, and this short-haired middle-aged woman grinning at them while she marries them.
Because she *loves* this. Patrick can tell. Like marrying people most of the time is *work* -- three or four services a day during the weekends all summer, and it's all rote, but weddings like this feel real to her on a level she really wanted them to, when she first went to seminary.
And when Pete kisses Patrick at the end of the service, hands on his cheeks and this really focused look, she's actually laughing a little bit, and so is Patrick, but he sounds a bit hysterical, and Pete's a bit wet, and the lesbians are cheering in the background.
And then they're back out on the street, and Pete's bouncing, and Patrick's shaking, and he looks at Pete and at the certificate in their hands, and he says, "Oh my god. we're *married*." Like he might faint. And Pete kisses him again and whispers, "Yeah," against his mouth, and hugs him really hard.
They don't go back to their hotel that night. Instead, Pete drives them to what's obviously a local make-out spot (how he finds it Patrick doesn't know, but he suspects the gay-marriage-happy lesbians), and they curl up around each other in the back seat and are just quiet and kiss occasionally until they fall asleep.
And in the morning they get breakfast sandwiches from Tim Horton's, who make them without meat in, and really strong coffee which might possibly have nicotine, or maybe heroin, in it, and go back to the hotel, where they take showers and go out and do publicity for the next show.
Patrick's a bit disturbed by how normal the day is, like except for the way his heart keeps pounding, and something about the quality of Pete's hugs, it's just a normal day and it never happened.
He carries the marriage certificate folded up inside his hoodie, because he's having some reality issues.
They play a pretty damn good concert that night, like you do, and Pete kisses him fairly seriously on stage, but that could be normal too. And then curls up with him in bed after, and they kiss and fall asleep, and it's only the next day, while they're all scrambling to get their shit together so they can get back on the bus, and maybe get some breakfast, that Pete tells Andy and Joe and their various surrounded-by people, "So Patrick and I got married."
Andy and Joe are all, "yeah, you're funny."
And Pete just keeps *grinning* at them like a demented something, so it's Patrick who has to say, "No, um. Really." Just quietly. And Joe stops and stares at him, and Andy sort of fails at getting out of his chair.
So Patrick digs in his hoodie and pulls out the marriage license and shows it to them. Pete looks at him, all obviously charmed that Patrick's been carrying it and not at all put out that it's now kind of crumpled.
It could almost be a Moment. Only, then they have to be on the bus Right Fucking Now, so Andy says "We're gonna talk about this. Later," and Joe sputters all the way down the hall.
Patrick things they might have to kill him and put him out of his misery. Or at least get him really drunk. It means they have to stop at a liquor store, which at this hour has mostly alcoholics in it. But then Pete says something about this documentary he watched about a rock tour in, like 1970, that bought out an entire liquor store, and Patrick has to point out that *none of them* are Janis Joplin, and by then they're all distracted and they have to go watch "Festival Train" again.
They all look like they're having a good time. Like, they have all these folk groups and really serious rock groups jamming together, and Robbie Robertson is crooning in the background, and everybody's happily drunk and half of them are married anyway.
One of those things that's still in Patrick's head when he goes to lie down in his bunk. And after a while Pete crawls in with him and hugs him, and they listen to the bus move for a while. Rhythm that eventually resolves itself for Patrick and he finds himself singing Don Henley's "For My Wedding," just quietly, and he can feel Pete smiling against his chest.
He's surprised at how normal it all is. They just go on, being married and cuddling a lot, and eventually Patrick realizes they're just like before, only more so. And a couple of hours after that he realizes they've broken Britney Spears' record and still not divorced, and he's still got the certificate tucked against his t-shirt.
They go out, and Pete sits in Patrick's lap and makes faces at people's camera phones, and Patrick holds him around the waist and hides behind Pete, and nobody really notices anything.
Mostly, Patrick keeps expecting Pete to do something else, because of the whole Grand Gesture thing, but he doesn't. Just kisses Patrick now and then and hugs him maybe a bit more than usual, and after another day or two brings him new lyrics and they go back to work. Which is, as always, incredibly intimate and sort of awesome, and it adds something to be able to lean across and kiss Pete after they've put something really awesome together. Writing, when it's good, feels like sex when it's good, and he's not sure why he didn't think about that before.
During an afternoon when they're not writing, just lying in a pile on the couch not-watching TV, Andy comes in and looks at them and says to Patrick, "You guys aren't having sex." It's not a question.
Patrick says, "Um, no." Pete snorts and stays asleep and drools on Patrick's shoulder.
Andy takes a deep breath, and sits down, and after a minute Patrick realizes that Andy's attempting some sort of weird, older-brother sex talk. The word "respect" gets thrown around, and there's a lot of emphasis on lube. It could, potentially, go on being unbearably awkward forever, except eventually Patrick pulls together enough of his brain to say, "No, I know. We're just not ... there yet."
And Andy nods and watches them for a while, and Patrick realizes he has both arms wrapped around Pete's waist where his t-shirt and jeans don't meet, because he's *keeping Pete warm*.
It's a mushier moment than he usually has, about Pete. But between that and Andy's slightly scary talk, Patrick's thinking about, well. Experience, or something. Like, he *knows* how many guys Pete's slept with, and the number's not huge. He can't quite keep track of how many guys Pete's *kissed*, because that's a way bigger number and the count started years before they met, but.
Patrick's personal running total, guys and girls, is eleven. And, see, he knows Pete's, too. It's eight.
One of those things that makes him laugh hard enough to wake Pete up.
He's laughing helplessly, like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard, and staring up at Pete, and then Pete starts to laugh, because that shit's contagious, and they're still laughing when they kiss.
They keep on kissing for really a long time.
Eventually, Patrick notices that Andy's gone, and that he's left them lube. And condoms. And a copy of "The Joy of Gay Sex". Which is inscribed to the two of them from Andy and Joe.
The book cracks them up harder. They might possibly hurt something while laughing. Something that makes it hard for Pete to climb the lighting rigs that night. And Patrick's abs hurt, and he has to actually use them to sing, so it's possible he sounds a bit ... odd that night. He can see Pete out of the corner of his eye, coming up to sing beside him. And then to kiss him, like he always does. Except, instead of letting him, Patrick actually turns and kisses Pete on the lips. In the middle of the song. "Hum Hallelujah" isn't ever going to be the same for him.
Over all the teenies screaming, Pete yells into the mic, "We got married in Canada!"
Patrick gets all red, and Joe and Andy sort of stop for a second and exchange this *look*. But it's not like anybody, you know, *believes* him. Not even, really, when Pete goes back to blogging and starts referring to Patrick as "the wife".
And then they go home. Or, well, to Los Angeles. Where they have separate houses. And there's this moment where they stare at each other, like they're not sure where they're going, and in that moment, Pete says, "I wrote you into my will. Like, a long time ago, but..."
Patrick thinks about that.
Then Pete says, "Hey, I have furniture!" like it's that easy. But maybe it is, because Patrick goes home with him. And maybe possibly picks Pete up over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and hauls him inside.
And then they make out against the door. Which is different, because they've been kissing for weeks, but that's not quite the same thing as making out. It was more just lips, before. Whereas now they're really tangled, with their stuff all around their feet -- duffle bags and guitar cases and grocery bags of stuff they haven't even sorted yet.
They don't. Sort stuff, that is.
They wind up going to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Curling up together on Pete's bed, in that bedroom that has nothing in it but a big TV and a rack of hoodies, and they have all this really warm afternoon light on the bed, and it's one of those days that's made for long, slow lip-mashings.
Really, Patrick thinks, he must be into this, because he's got Pete pinned to the bed, and he keeps *nuzzling* him. Kissing his ears. Grinding against Pete's thigh.
And then after a while Pete reaches up and takes away Patrick's hat, just like he's allowed to do that. And then he takes Patrick's shirt.
Throws it far, far away, and then wrestles with Patrick like they've been doing since about two weeks after they met, until he's got Patrick on his back and Pete's straddling his hips, maybe grinding down some, and he kisses Patrick with his eyes open, sort of hopefully, and reaches out for Patrick's hand. Laces their fingers and rubs their rings together.
This second where Patrick actually thinks about that, how he took off the engagement ring eventually, because it was big and it was rubbing (though he's got it in the pocket of his jeans), but he hasn't taken the wedding ring off, and, he thinks, neither has Pete. It's not that visible, though -- gold-white against pasty-white fingers. Pete's is a bit more stark, but not much. It's subtle enough that you might not see the rings, if you weren't looking for them.
And yet: Patrick's got this ring on, and it has Pete's initials engraved in it, and he *married* this guy. Honestly he did. He stood up in front of people, not a lot of people, but some, and said "I do" in the right places, and they kissed, and they signed the book and filled out the license and walked out of the church holding each other's hands and they're *married*.
Pete says, "Are you okay?"
"I'm panicking."
"What, about the sex thing?"
Patrick unscrews his eyes and stares at Pete. "*No*."
Which he thinks maybe Pete gets. It's not like Patrick ever had time to think things through. Except in the way where, lately, he sometimes talks in interviews about how he'd like to be married and maybe have kids and teach them things, and now he's having a moment in which he's picturing Pete as the mother of his children.
It results in really giggly sex. One of the things that Patrick learned, a while back, when he was officially Learning Things About Sex, is that sex is better when you're laughing through it, because you miss the awkward and the embarrassing, and also it's just way less alien. More like something you'd do with a person you really liked.
And it's awesome. It's awkward, and they mess a certain number of things up, and at one point Pete puts his elbow into Patrick's eye and then they have to fight about that for a while, and it ends up with an apology blowjob.
As it turns out, their sex sort of goes like that -- talking, fooling around, one of them reducing the other one to non-verbal, quivering goo, and then they make out until they turn it around. For hours. Until Hemingway's scratching at the door and that means that Joe's actually somewhere in the house, and it's *dark*, and Patrick finds his watch in the sheets and realizes they've been on the bed for something like six hours.
He's hungry.
*Really* hungry. Like he might revert to being carnivorous and just eat the next person he meets.
Pete's more or less unconscious, curled up between Patrick and a pillow, and Patrick kisses him and finds his jeans and a t-shirt and goes downstairs. Joe's on the dog-chewed couch, reading, with noise-canceling headphones clamped over both ears.
Joe is a good man. He brought them protein shakes.
Patrick's stupidly grateful. He remembers, vaguely, after the first time he had sex, long enough ago that he wasn't a vegetarian yet, he wound up at a fast food place at two in the morning wolfing down hamburgers. It's not just the food thing: his body craves *meat*, or as close to it as he's willing to put in his mouth.
He nods at Joe and drinks a protein shake and orders them a lot of pizza.
While the food's en route, Patrick digs his laptop out of the mess by the door and finds enough of a wireless signal from the neighbors to get online. He e-mails his lawyer (he has a *lawyer*; he's never getting used to that).
And the next day, when he's woken up next to Pete in this big bed that's actually, he guesses, theirs, there's a courier with an envelope for him who shows up all casual, like it doesn't matter what in the envelope at all. Patrick reads through it all, signs where he's supposed to, and then stares at the pile of papers for a long time. Goes to sit out on the balcony and look at the valley and sings a half-dozen stupid pop songs until he's calmed down. Then gets up, picks up the papers and a pen, and brings them to Pete.
The thing about Pete, though, is that Pete doesn't sign anything he hasn't read front to back, so he's there for a while, just reading, occasionally noting stuff with a pencil in the margins. And then he looks at Patrick and grins at him, and signs.
And *laughs*.
He says, "You just totally endowed me with your worldly goods."
Patrick's chest is in knots, but he says, "Yeah, I did."
And really, what they could do now is either fight or have a lot of sex, but instead they put on actual clothes and go out for lunch. They have one of those almost-normal LA days where they're outside the paparazzi net, but everything's still brighter and more surreal than anything in Chicago. Go to this little vegan restaurant where they make really serious sandwiches and also mushroom burgers with not-cheese, staffed by a workers' collective. The back wall's a bookstore of socialist and anarchist texts, and everyone's way too cool to know who Pete and Patrick are.
Patrick loves this place. They feed him, and he can have a long, complicated conversation with Pete about whether "This is Spinal Tap" is better than "Hard Core Logo."
Pete steals Patrick's sweet potato fries and Patrick tries to steal them back, and there's this second when their fingers are laced and they're fighting almost lip to lip for one slice of spicy yam, and somewhere off to his left, Patrick hears a cell phone make the camera-click sound.
Click. Click. Soft beeep that's the i'm-not-a-camera camera-sound.
So after that, there's nothing for it but to go record shopping. It takes almost two hours for anyone to phone them about, you know, the pictures on the internet of them wearing fucking *wedding rings*.
It's not as big a deal as it could be. Joe offers to get one of his own, maybe one for Andy. Andy balks at supporting an institution that discriminates, but he's still nodding a bit.
"People will just think it's an us thing," Joe explains, "instead of a you guys thing."
Pete looks like he's thinking about it, but Patrick blurts out, "No," and everyone looks at him.
"I don't. No." The ring's heavy on his finger and he doesn't want. Fuck. "We told people already."
"Patrick," says Joe.
"No. You don't. I don't want you to."
He doesn't even know why he's protesting, because they could pull it off. They could pretty easily make the entire world think that they were doing some weird friendship ring exchange married to the band commitment deal, but that's not what it is and Patrick doesn't really want anyone to think so.
He remembers this girl that he met exactly once, in a club in Tacoma, telling him that the way she saw it, the only reason to get married was to be a total exhibitionist about it.
And then he thinks, True Love.
Pete just laughs and leans against Patrick's shoulder. "I'm not getting into some weird polyandry thing with you, Joe. You're just too much man for me."
"You're sure?" asks Joe. "'Cause I know some really liberal rabbis."
Andy looks at Pete for a while. He says, "You know how I renounced violence?"
Pete nods.
"Well, if you fuck this up, I will kick your ass."
And that, maybe, is what makes it official: three rings, two months, a legal contract, and a brotherly death-threat.
If this actually were The Princess Bride (the book version, which Patrick found under Pete's bed a while back), there'd be a passage here about them kissing, and it being one of the top ten kisses ever. But it isn't, because, as Patrick's noticed, his life never consists of just the good bits. So instead he winds up sitting with Pete on their bed at night with a camera and Pete's laptop. This one picture they take of their hands laced, both rings showing, goes into Pete's current favorite blog. And then Pete goes into the folder full of unanswered fan questions for the q&a and picks a particularly hysterical one. He answers it, "no patrick and i got married in canada. i told you we were goign to. now i own half his record collection. its canadian law."
Patrick gets in quick enough to leave the first comment. He writes, "really."
And really, that's it. Except for how Joe posts "mazel tov" on his own blog, and Andy buys them a toaster, but the thing Patrick did learn from the Princess Bride, other than the validity of True Love, is that stories don't really end, they just drift off into other stuff. Like the time Pete tries to explain something dumb to Rolling Stone and Patrick kicks him out for a week until Pete buys him vintage Air Jordans and an old recording of Robert Johnson.
And when they get matching cheaply-printed t-shirts that say, "living happily ever after".
And when Patrick forgets Pete's birthday because he was in the studio and Pete sulks for weeks about it.
And the other stories about them too. And.
And.